Hill, A Nation Of Change And Novelty - Radical Politics, Religion And Literature In Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

Christopher (J.E. C.) Hill is the grand old man of Tudor-Stuart English historiography. Born just before the Great War, in 1912, and now four score years of age, his long and distinguished career was capped by what is perhaps the most coveted of all British academic priz.es, the Mastership of Balliol College, Oxford from 1965-1978, from whence he gradually retired from academe. What makes Hill's career so fascinating is that for a generation he was the leading Marxist scholar of England's travails as it moved from the medieval to the modern age, 1500-1700. Indeed, until 1957 he was a member of the British Communist Party.